Just one year out, Kendall Hoffman ’23, MPS ’23, already sees how her education in the Master of Professional Studies program in information science informs her work as a product manager.
“Being in this role and directly applying what I learned in college and grad school has been really cool,” she said.
Hoffman's "role” is within the federal workforce. In August, she was named one of 70 U.S. Digital Corps Fellows chosen from more than 2,000 applicants nationwide. Launched by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021 and administered by the U.S. General Services Administration, the two-year fellowship is awarded to early-career technologists and intended as a pathway to careers in priority areas within the federal government, namely artificial intelligence, public health, and cybersecurity. Hoffman works as a product manager supporting a team within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that has developed a free, publicly available tool called Logging Made Easy. It allows smaller organizations to monitor networks, identify users, and strengthen their cybersecurity.
“The tool is a first line of defense for companies or small organizations who maybe have zero cybersecurity posture. It’s completely free and open-source,” she said. “Before I joined, the team was very technically focused, so I'm helping to bring a lot of user-centered design principles to the team.”
The prospect of a career in tech would’ve perhaps puzzled Hoffman as a high school student in Ossining, NY. Back then, she’d sworn off coding and most anything adjacent to computer science after taking an AP computer science course she called “probably the least favorite class I’d ever taken.”
“I told myself I was never doing that again,” she said.
Hoffman arrived at Cornell as an environment and sustainability major. Then COVID-19 hit in the second semester of her first year.
“I think that led to a lot of introspection and reflection on what I was doing,” she said.
Continuing her education virtually, Hoffman ended up taking a statistics class in R, a programming language for statistical computing, and liked it so much she got curious about other technical skills that could prove valuable upon graduation. She gave coding another try, took a Python course, and did well. By venturing further into offerings within the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, she discovered the information science major.
Information science’s “open-ended” nature appealed to Hoffman. She could take traditional tech-oriented courses, like coding, and a variety of others, all while incorporating her interest in clean technology and sustainability. She opted to double major in information science as well as environment and sustainability.
In the latter half of her senior year, Hoffman enrolled in the Department of Information Science’s MPS early credit option, which allows seniors to take MPS-level courses and work toward their MPS degree as undergraduates. Whereas the MPS program traditionally takes two or three semesters to complete, students taking the early credit option need only an additional semester beyond their undergraduate years to complete the MPS program, saving a semester of tuition in the process.
“I wanted to build onto that undergrad experience, enrich it, and deepen it a lot more,” she said. “It was really appealing to me.”
Hoffman liked that the MPS program wasn’t purely about bolstering technical skills. She learned user-experience design principles, too, and how to create tools that are accessible and usable – skills that have proved critical thus far in her current role as product manager.
"That education is being used in my job every day and has helped me develop and improve the Logging Made Easy product in ways that support the broader CISA organization, but also users,” she said.
For her MPS project – the program’s linchpin course where students work with client companies to build solutions for real problems – Hoffman served as project manager on a student team that worked with Microsoft mentors to build a university course registration system using Microsoft Azure’s cloud services. That hands-on experience in working with cross-functional teams to solve real-world problems is one of the most valuable aspects of the program, she said.
“That hands-on focus was not unique to the MPS project course. It was a feature of other courses too. Almost every single class had a class project,” she said. “I took very few exams. The program’s emphasis on the application of what we were learning – not just the memory recall of concepts – was super useful for me and the way that I learn.”
Was the MPS worth it?
“Absolutely. It tied up the loose ends that I had from undergrad,” she said. “It gave me such a good foundation for seeing how teams get things done, which has a direct application in my job now.”
Louis DiPietro is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.